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hi for the love of god can people please stop taking chinese settings and characters and placing them wholesale into european and western tropes and analysing the characters through that lens?
it reads as being very disrespectful and erasing.
it reads as being very disrespectful and erasing.
one isolated case is like. okay sure. you do you?? I guess???????
a bunch of them together by different people who probably don’t even know each other points towards a pattern i’m really not comfortable with.
a bunch of them together by different people who probably don’t even know each other points towards a pattern i’m really not comfortable with.
like obviously i’m not trying to police fanfic or art, but i do think that there’s an unconscious (or maybe conscious, idk) bias in consistently portraying these characters in a western setting. Why does it have to be western? Why not have AUs set in different chinese periods?
also. analysing the characters and the world they live in through a western lens and refusing to try and understand a chinese lens is just plain orientalism.
I understand that chinese culture is new to a lot of people. I do love that chinese stories are becoming more popular, more known, and that audiences from so many different cultures are now introduced to them, with shows with NIF and The Untamed
But that’s not an excuse to not try.
If this is a story you’ve fallen in love with, that compels you to create works based on it, don’t you think it’s basic respect to understand where it originates from?
If this is a story you’ve fallen in love with, that compels you to create works based on it, don’t you think it’s basic respect to understand where it originates from?
yeah you may be part of a minority. but it wouldn’t feel pleasant if people just came over to your culture and started erasing the history and lived experiences and just started mapping your culture onto their own would it?
suddenly it’s not its own thing anymore.
suddenly it’s not its own thing anymore.
it now exists only in relation to that other person’s culture. Their limited understanding of the world. Cos let’s face it, no one person has an omniscient understanding of the world and all its culture and history and experience.
and i think there’s something that people in english-speaking communities don’t really see: if you move in such a community, the major default lens is white. Whether that’s because of colonialism or because your country is white, the system we live in is informed by that.
anyway this was just a bit of a rant, and i hope people realise how hurtful it is to keep seeing chinese culture consistently treated as a thing that can only be related through being mapped over by another culture.
It’s cool to point out similarities for sure! It’s always amazing to see where human history and cultures differ and in what ways humanity retains its similarities.
BUT. Please consider the difference between saying, ’hey! this exists in my culture too’, and ’so, X character/clan DEFINITELY are this and this trope in my culture, and I’ve decided they’re based on my culture now.’
Very different vibes.
SEMI-RELATED but not really.
If you’re looking for modern songs for your mxtx modern AUs, can I suggest looking at mandopop artists like Jay Chou or Faye Wong?
China does listen to American music, but Nicki Minaj is not as popular there as you think she is.
If you’re looking for modern songs for your mxtx modern AUs, can I suggest looking at mandopop artists like Jay Chou or Faye Wong?
China does listen to American music, but Nicki Minaj is not as popular there as you think she is.
actually maybe i should make a music thread of major mando/cantopop artists from the 90s to late 2010s for ref 
would that be helpful?
would that be helpful?
